“Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don’t believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever,” the unsigned post reads. "We’re actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.
Good guy devs and count me in for self-hosting a dedicated server.
In some cases one, in other cases the other, so that might be what you’re reading. In at least one of these cases, we’re talking about consumer demand, what I want as a customer, the customer is always right, yadda yadda.
Legislatively, I support what SKG is after. My personal desires are for more than that, because the product doesn’t offer enough value to me compared to one that works offline from day 1. And I think whether customers can articulate that well enough or not, they’re making a similar evaluation of the product in front of them, which explains the culture around people making a lot of noise about Steam charts, prematurely declaring “dead games”, and so on. A game like this one that launches as anything other than a phenomenal success looks like a bad investment if other people didn’t already sign on in droves.
Without legislation, they could tell me the offline binary is ready to release and all they have to do is hit the button, but I’d have no reason to believe them.
This is exactly why I believe it wouldn’t fracture very far. It’s going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.
As for the intended experience, how much does it bother developers that their customers play offline games with mods? Or back in the day we’d use cheat codes. Grand Theft Auto always had missions, but for at least the first four iterations of it, it was more of just a chaos sandbox where people would ignore the main throughline. My favorite way to play Factorio is with aliens turned off. Devs have all sorts of ways to tells us what the intended experience is, but deviating from that should be our choice. I’ll get more value out of a game that doesn’t take that away from me, and I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one. It’s why Rockstar hired all of those roleplay server folks to officially integrate it into GTA6. The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.
It’s nice to have in the worst case, I agree. My only point in all of this is for you to agree that there are reasons beyond greed to centralize servers. It’s not always that they want to be the next Fortnite. There are practical budgetary and gameplay reasons to prioritize central servers. One does not simply ship a binary to the public and forget about it. It’s a whole product they need to support and test along with every update.
Again, I disagree with this cynical take. Games worth playing are art, and art is not about giving the audience what it wants, it’s about an artist who has something to say that can’t be conveyed through words alone. I applaud a dev who has the guts to say, “I don’t care what you want, I’m making the experience I want people to experience”. I’ve seen too many games lose their vision, turn to their playerbase, and just do whatever the players tell them to. To me, that’s making escapism, not art. To me, the mark of a successful game is one where the creator makes exactly what they intended to, even if no one wants to play it.
The Factorio devs let you turn off aliens because that’s their intention for you to be able to do that, and that’s fine. And I defend your right to hack at any software running on your hardware to experience it however you want to, that’s fine. But it’s not an artist’s responsibility to help you achieve the experience you want, and we shouldn’t require them to. We can ask them to, but we shouldn’t require them to.
The PR-friendly response for why they centralize servers always sounds good, because it’s PR. They push lots more updates than they did in the old days because it’s part of the business model, whereas we used to get sequels and expansion packs that paid for that work up front. This is another way of framing my perspective on this modern business model as being expensive for them and generally a losing bet that’s not worth pursuing compared to how we used to do things.
I don’t even consider that cynical. It’s the only conclusion I can come to based on how these different companies behave. The artist already told me clearly what the intended experience was, and if I bought the damn thing, I should be able to disregard it. Games are also games, and we should be able to run house rules. Getting in the way of that is just making the product worse, regardless of what the art is.